Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
I don't know all of those authors, but the ones I do know would be "juvenile," not YA.
YA is more adult because the violence may be more disturbing, and relationships may be a significant theme. Romeo and Juliet would be YA, I think.
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True, but consider that current culture doesn't try to shelter teenagers as much as 50's culture did. For that matter 50's fiction wasn't as routinely "raw" as even today's YA markets.
The Heinlein juveniles (and Asimov's--people tend to forget the David Starr books) were the 50's SF equivalent of today's young adult market, aimed at the 15-21 age bracket; literate high schoolers and university undergrads. Heinlein explained it as "make the protagonist 17 and write him as an adult after that". Isn't that pretty much the formula for current YA fiction? (For that matter, lots of other classic SF&F works that aren't labeled juveniles follow it. Hal Clement's NEEDLE comes to mind.)
Different authors will have different ideas of what "write him/her as an adult" means but we need to remember that times change; what other eras would have considered adult material today barely rates a PG or PG13 rating in movie terms. In the SF/Fantasy genres, pretty much any pre-60s material is teenager-friendly even though the bulk of the audience at the time was adult. (Mostly because the publishers balked at more mature content.)
YA has always existed. The prominence of the label today is simply marketing and the realization that the Harry Potter cohort is a market worth pursuing.